Understanding China in the 21st Century

Speaker: Donald Santacaterina

China’s rise to world superpower amidst its maintenance of a one-party, authoritarian political model has left a wide variety of questions for global audiences. This lecture focuses on recent Chinese history, emphasizing how the Chinese Communist party uses historical narratives to explain and expand their political goals. By describing the way many Chinese citizens understand their history, this lecture aims to cultivate mutual understanding and common ground for discussion over the many antagonisms which plague China-U.S. relations, from human rights violations in Xinjiang to China-Hong Kong relations to the expansion of Chinese technology corporations overseas.


Donald is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has a Master’s Degree in Chinese history and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2015. Donald’s research interests revolve around propaganda, media systems, and newspaper culture in recent Chinese history. His dissertation engages with the Chinese-socialist media landscape through a variety of lenses, including consumption of material in public “newspaper reading groups,” the analysis of Chinese-socialist advertising culture in the People’s Daily newspaper, and the practice of amateur journalism and journalistic practices across local newspaper bureaus in Anhui province. He is particularly interested in constructions of truth value across global newspaper cultures in the 20th century, and how these values have influenced the shape of contemporary Chinese media and propaganda. He administers the website, Propaganda in Translation, which is funded by the Maynard Adams Fellowship for the Public Humanities.

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